I thoroughly enjoyed reading James Bach’s Secrets of A Buccaneer-Scholar book and strongly recommend reading it. The book gives a great confidence on how Self- Education and Pursuit of Passion can lead to a Lifetime of Success. Most of software testers from India are either B.E or MCA degree holders. I can’t understand why we need yet another certification?

I love to hear from those certified people how that helped in day-to-day testing activity? Did that help to improve testing skills? Does that help the clients? Does that make an expert? I can accept those certifications one and only if it helps to solve practical problems and if that improves questioning and thinking skills. Yes, you can learn some theoretical definitions of testing terms, but wait “You Can never be sure if you have a correct definition, but don’t ever stop trying to get one” from Are your lights on? Sadly these certifications never allow you to try or question it.

Please use your sapience to make decisions. I know many do certification because Mr. X or company forces\recommends. In this commercialized world both Mr. X and companies are either fooled by marketing or they are lazy to find better way of judging testers skills. Most Mr. X doesn’t even know the syllabus of such certificate programs pathetic.

Also remember you can’t just go to Mr. X and say I can’t do certification. If you need a change find replacements first. Start writing blogs, share your ideas, be proactive, and speak with customer support team to understand the customers’ better, try to bring in new ideas and innovation into testing. Remember any idea should help to progress and never be an overhead. If you are interested in installation, configurations of Servers learn, set up and control the QA environment. Learn some Open Source tool and scripting language like Ruby or Perl, and then apply them in to improve the testing process.

After three to four years of experience in the industry I realized most are running behind such impractical certification and fantasy automation. Even though my sapience says those are not impractical, I was not able to judge myself as I lack experience, until I came across Dr Cem Kaner and James Bach web sites. So explore, think, analyze, discuss, debate, fail, learn, unlearn until you are learn the truth. There is a saying in Tamil “Mere seeing or hearing an information does not reveal the truth, investigate hard to learn the truth”. So learn the truth, stand up and fight bravely or be a Slave.

Yes, it is a challenging path unfortunately you have only two paths a challenging one or a boring one. Remember The Matrix movie? Morpheus gives Neo a choice between two pills: red to learn the truth, blue to return to the world as he knows it. Choose Your pill and I know I can’t wake people who pretend to sleep.

Devon Smith,
Thanks for your comments certifications can be like a celebration of you knowledge
True if that really helps to to gain real practical knowledge,but what i see in all these certifications are just a money making commercial ideas.
I believe there are N other real celebrations of knowledge
Regards,
Dhanasekar S

I can’t agree with you more but I believe we need more than just self education. The problem that I see with testers fresh out certification or even testers who have been around a few years is that knowing what to learn next isn’t always easy or obvious.

If we all did self education then we would all need to research where to go next in our testing careers.

So I decided to try and do something about it and would love your (and anyone else’s feedback).

What I proposed is a road-map to testing capability. The system isn’t about scores and there is no test at the end. You self assess against a set of what _can_ be done by a tester and from there you identify areas of improvement. After that it is just practice and guidance.

If your interested in such an approach I’ve written about it and provided the road maps in my “futures in software testing” series.

I have now 2 years experience in testing. In my first two months, the company got us certified by ISTQB. I can honestly say that it helped me, especially because everything was new for me. It doesn’t teach you everything and it should not do that, but it can push you faster in the right direction. The danger is that some people think a certification is enough, and they stop pursuing self improvement. My philosophy is that there no useless information, and you can extract knowledge from everything. Even if you “waste” your time watching a snail, you can still learn learn that if you were a snail you would walk very slow 🙂

If you can get a ISTQB in two months with out any experience,I am wondering about it standards.[I am not blaming you for that ]Yes it might help you with some definition on testing terms but nothing practical. I would rather put you in real practical situation and make you to understand the real testing rather than a bookish knowledge.
Never ever imagine to be a snail,you will never be one.Be yourself 🙂
–Dhanasekar S

Just started reading the book, and it’s a great motivation for those who don’t believe in “Schools” and “certificates”. And for those who really want to do something on what they love. Thanks DS for sharing such an awesome article. And would love to learn more and more from you in many ways..!!:-) Soon going to join you…:-)